


There's A She-Wolf In the Closet

by msunitedsnakes



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen, One Shot, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans Sheila, im writing this bc its a crime that nobody writes anything for sheila shes so wonderful, its mainly her struggling with her identity and how her parents see her, okay so!!!! sheila is trans and thats that on that, theres a she wolf in the closet.... let her out so she can breathe, this is based around her monologue at the ball, this may be a little triggering for some ppl idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 07:51:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20738789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msunitedsnakes/pseuds/msunitedsnakes
Summary: There's a reason Sheila had that monologue memorized.(spoiler alert: sheila is trans and she really relates to that monologue)





	There's A She-Wolf In the Closet

There was something wrong with Sheila. 

Even here, at this bastion of acceptance, she couldn’t bring herself to tell everyone that it was true. It was all true.

There was a reason why she had that monologue memorized. Nobody asked about it. Which was good, probably. She didn’t need everyone to know just how deeply she connected to that monologue. She didn’t need them to know that she lived like that before GLOW. 

She was made to go about in boy’s clothes. Now, her parents didn’t even know that that was a problem in the beginning. They thought she was a boy. As a boy, of course, she was made to do the men’s work, distanced from her mother and lectured to by her father. In her father’s defense, he just thought she was bad at being a boy; he didn’t know just how true that was. 

She came into the world against her mother’s wishes. And her father’s wishes, at that. They had a beautiful baby boy, a miracle after trying for years. They loved this boy. But after 16 years this boy disappeared. Sheila brought herself into the world and her mother and father thought she took him from them. 

She was brought up like a child of nature. Her parents loved the outdoors; her mother loved it in an aesthetic sense, but her father was the ultra-masculine type, the man who fished and hunted and cut down trees for firewood at their summer cabin. Her parents loved the outdoors, and her parents hated her. They hated her, they missed  _ him _ . Sheila couldn’t be their son, but she could still be their child of nature. So she became the She-Wolf. And it worked! For a while, at least. Sheila was still a she for her, and a wolf for her parents. Wolves were powerful, masculine, so if she was a wolf, there was still their boy in there, right? And Sheila could cover herself in thick pelts, obscuring her body so she couldn’t have a man’s body or a woman’s body or just a human’s body; she could be a wolf and forget about all that. She could forget about humans being closed-minded, forget about them ignoring her or seeing her incorrectly or calling her a boy when she  _ clearly _ wasn’t a boy, she was a wolf. 

She did sympathize with her father. She did take her mother’s part for a time. She softened her father’s pain by connecting with his beloved nature. She took her mother’s pain by mourning with her for the son she never had, for the son Sheila could never be. She carried this even past leaving home. The Wolf became a security blanket, a reminder of her parents’ love for her, of their unspoken bargain for acceptance. The desert destroyed that.

In that desert, she saw herself. She saw that lone wolf, she reached out to connect, and it rejected her. She couldn’t go on like this. The Wolf was an untouchable image, a lie holding her back, a persona that she wasn’t and that stopped her from being Sheila. She could never truly connect with anyone as the Wolf. After all, Ruth didn’t become her friend until she saw  _ Sheila _ . So she shed it. That big fire would come, she knew, as she stood with Ruth at the camp. 

She swore to never be a man’s slave. She was not her father’s slave, and no longer could she be the slave to the son that she never was. 

* * *

Everything was right with Sheila. 

After that night in the desert, that monologue of her pain, after Arthie’s confession and her  _ joy _ and the  _ team’s _ joy — she was happy to see her parents for the holidays. She knew that she had a family in this team, these people that loved her as the Wolf but loved her even more as  _ Sheila _ . She could tell them about her past and they would still love her, they would cheer for her like they did after her monologue. No matter what her parents thought, if they gave her the gift of their acceptance and love or the gift of letting her shed one more thing that was holding her back, she would always have GLOW and she would always, always have Sheila. 

**Author's Note:**

> so! this is my first fic in a long time. i only ever published one other one when i was 15 and... yeah that was a thing. i have a few wips but i really wanted to get sheila content out there because i love her so much and there arent any fics about her!!! im so starved for sheila and sheila/ruth content so i will be the conductor on this train if anyone wants to jump on with me. 
> 
> im not trans (i think. ive been questioning my gender and im somewhere between nb and girl) so please if youre trans and something in this was off please feel free to tell me!! i tried to base her feelings off of both the 80s setting and how she acts in the show (the entire show i hc'ed sheila as trans and then after the drag ball ep i was like OKAY..... OKAY SO SHE REALLY TRANS HUH... so thats what inspired me for this hgsfhkjdj)
> 
> my tumblr is tozier-the-trashmouth if you wanna hmu and join my love sheila club


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